How to Build a Website to Make Money: Case Study to Success

Learn to Create Your Own Income Online

Can you believe that well over 3000 searches per month are requested for the search term ‘how to make money on the internet’? This number is growing, and I expect that by the time we understand that robots will be taking our jobs, this number will be through the roof.

You know, all those jobs that can be automated such as in warehouses, factories and transportation positions. They’ll all be gone in the near future, so large numbers of people will be searching for an alternate income source.

Building a website to make money is certainly an option and should not be ignored. The majority of us have daily access to a computer of some sort, whether it’s a PC or laptop, and you can write material for a blog that can generate an income. All you need is the know-how which I can show you.

This article is about “how to build a website to make money”, which requires a fair amount of work. I apologise to any of you reading this, thinking that creating a website to make money is easy. Hold on a minute! Let me rephrase that. Making money on the internet is time consuming!

The process of making money and website creation IS easy, you will just require patience and will power to push through.

What do I mean by this? Well, unlike some common misconceptions out there that all you need is a good idea to make money online, this is totally wrong. You also need to build out a website and have the patience to allow it to rank in the search engines.

Google and Bing won’t just place your content on page 1. Oh no, you need to learn how to get your content to page 1, and part of this is time.

But hey, time fly’s by anyway, you may as well make use of it!

Now, you’re probably wanting to do this yourself and therefore, not pay others to do it for you.

Of course, you can outsource some tasks, but you’ve then got to recoup all that money before making any profit. Also, if somebody else creates your website, you won’t know how to maintain it.

Learning a new skill like website creation is not that difficult. I want you to learn this just like I did, and keep any profits for yourself.

So, where do we start with all this? You may be thinking, what kind of website should i make to make money? Well, how about this brand-new website, and I’ll bring you along the journey with me.

I’m beginning this as a case study and will update this post as I create the website. I’ll run through each step that I’m doing, and you can follow along. How does that sound! Let’s begin then!

The Easy Way to Build

My initial setup of this website was done with 5 clicks of the mouse. It’s the easiest way I’ve ever known to build a website and took under 1 minute.

I use a website builder that is one of the tools at Wealthy Affiliate. This program has two versions of membership, one being a free version, so you can sign up for FREE and try this for yourself.

This way you can follow along and implement the same steps I’m doing. Below is a video showing just how easy and quick it was to set up.  

 The above website creation was used for tutorial purposes and was deleted immediately after creation. Therefore the login credentials are no longer relevant.

This has built me a website made with WordPress which is the most common CMS (Content Management System) platform worldwide. So popular in fact, that over 60 million websites have been built using WordPress.

This is good news for you is the support community for WordPress is huge. For those that cannot watch the video above for various reasons, this is a simple 5 step/click process.

Step 1 – You’ll be given a multiple-choice option. If you have your own domain you can choose this option, if not choose ‘Free domain’ and you will be given a ‘SiteRubix’ suffixed domain.

Alternatively, if you’d like to register a domain through Wealthy Affiliate you can select this option. All 3 choices will direct you to step 2 after setting your domain preference.

Step 2 – Choose the domain you own from the dropdown menu, or type in a domain name that you’d like your website to be called. Eg: newonlinecareer

Step 3 – Give your name a Title. Eg: New Online Career

Step 4 – Choose a Theme. Every website looks different and yours will be also. With the free membership you’ll have a choice of approximately 12 themes. The premium membership offers you over 2,400 choices for how you’d like your website to appear.

Step 5 – Select ‘Click Here to Build This Site’. Your website will now be created ready for you to use. As you can see, it couldn’t be any easier and Wealthy Affiliate makes sure the websites created are secure with background features and technologies.

You may also be wondering about the hosting, we’ll that’s all part of your membership at Wealthy Affiliate.

Yeah, even the free membership! You can read all about that and the website builder here. Once the website builder finishes its process and you have website all ready to go, you will see a page with all your website details including a username and password.

These have been generated for you and the login process is made easy if you’re signed into Wealthy Affiliate. Just click the login button, and it the login details will be filled in for you.

Initial Plugins to Get Started

When you first log into your website, if you click on plugins, a list of the available plugins will be displayed. There are 2 plugins that Wealthy Affiliate websites have automatically installed, All-in-One SEO and EWWW Optimizer.

They may not be activated so go ahead and click ‘Activate’.

These are two of the crucial plugins that websites require so if you’re not using the Wealthy Affiliate website builder, I’d suggest you install these plugins to your WordPress website. Here’s what these plugins do.

All-in-One SEO – Every website needs an SEO plugin. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is how search terms get ranked in search engines such as Google and Bing. I believe that All-in-One SEO is the ultimate in SEO plugins. There’s always been a subject of contention between All-in-One SEO or Yoast SEO, as the better plugin.

For years I used Yoast SEO, as I am triggered my visuals. The traffic light system Yoast has is great, so too is the interface and its easy on the eye. But recently I’ve found that they bloat their program and it’s become too heavy and slows my websites down. I’ve also had conflicting elements with other plugins or themes when using Yoast, which has messed up particular sections of my dashboard.

So, I now steer clear of Yoast but that’s not to say it’s a bad plugin, it just hasn’t suited my websites.

EWWW Optimizer – If you ever do a website analysis from an analyser such as GT Metrix or Page Speed Insights, you’ll usually find the biggest issue that slows your website from loading quickly, is the size of the images.

This always needs to be rectified but having a plugin such as EWWW Optimizer to help optimise your images will give huge benefits to your loading times. Another great tip for images is to scale them down to the size you want before uploading them to your website.

Once you done this, drag and drop them into Shortpixel.com. It will optimise and reduce your file size by approximately 40-50%. I’ve had some images reduce in size by 60-70% which is hugely beneficial to any website.

Other Plugins Over time you will upload other plugins into your website. Unfortunately, it can become a bit of a habit because you expect to see improvements with each plugin.

On the flip side though, not all plugins are created equal and some will slow your website down. It’s advisable to keep a minimal number of plugins for this purpose.

Critical Pages that All Websites Require

Now that you’ve got these couple of plugins activated, it’s time to set up a few pages that will keep you safe and legitimate from the powers that be. You can read about the difference between a page and a post in WordPress here.

If you look through any website, you will see (usually in the footer of the site) a privacy policy. Every website requires one of these for legal purposes.

You probably won’t know what to write, so if you check out Google, there are a number of free privacy policy generators that you can access.

Privacypolicies.com and getterms.io are two such programs that can help you with this. You’ll just be required to fill in a few blanks such as your website domain, website title and country.

Once filled in you can have a privacy policy generated for you which can be copied and pasted into a new page.

Another page that you’ll want to add is an Earnings Disclaimer, which explains how your website information is not making outrageous claims of wealth and prosperity, and that your visitors must do their due diligence should they act upon any advice you’re giving.

An Affiliate Disclaimer should also be completed to advise visitors that you may earn a commission should they buy a product that you recommend. Affiliate programs such as Amazon state this as a requirement.

These are the more mundane additions you must create, and I’d like to inform you that they will only have to be done once. However, they may need updating or revising every now and again.

Let’s Get this Website Looking Great!

During the website build (if you used the Wealthy Affiliate website builder), you will have chosen a theme for appearance purposes. If you go to your website dashboard, you’ll see ‘Appearance’ on the side menu.

Your theme settings will probably be located here, and you can adjust the settings to suit your liking.

Not all theme settings are located here however, like the theme I generally use. My favourite theme is called Divi and it’s made by Elegant Themes.

The reason I use it, is because I like the drag and drop modules which can keep things clean and organised if setup correctly. If you’d like to use the same theme it can be purchased here. If not that’s okay, you’ll just have to find the settings for your particular theme.

To install this Divi theme, I firstly downloaded it from the Elegant Themes website. Then in the website dashboard, go to Appearance>Themes. Click on ‘Upload’ and browse for the file just downloaded. Click on ‘Install’. You’ll notice an ‘Active’ button on the image of Divi theme, go ahead and activate it.

Immediately after this installation is complete and activated, you will see ‘Divi’ in the dashboard menu. Hover over this and select ‘Theme Options’. On the above tabs, click on ‘Updates’.

By filling in the username and API fields, Elegant Themes will automatically update your Divi theme whenever a new update is released. Nice hey! Here’s my video to show you how it’s done.

Using a Child Theme

The following step is advisable but not essential. A child theme is based around the theme you are using, but allows you to make coding changes which will not be set back to the defaults when the theme gets an update.

It’s like having a coat on top of your theme which keeps all the changes you’ve made safe and secure. There are several ways you can do this, I’ll show you what I did.

Head on over to Divi Cake and fill out the information fields related to your website, including your email address (yeah, I dislike giving out my email address also but sometimes its essential to get what you want). They will then send you a child theme file.

Now go back to your dashboard>Appearance>Themes and upload this new Divi child theme.

Activate this as your new theme. Divi will still run in the background and the Divi child will run concurrently.

You’ll notice other themes that WordPress pre-install. Click on each one, and you’ll see a delete button. Delete all these themes (Not Divi or the child theme). Keeping these extra themes just takes up website resources and can slow down your website.

So, you now have a website with a great theme to begin your new website, congratulations on getting this far. Let’s go ahead and make some more changes.

Who Are You!

Your visitors are going to want to know who you are. If you don’t change a setting for this, every post that you send out will have ‘admin’ as the author. This is not ideal, and you’ll lose much credibility if you leave this as it is. In your dashboard you will see ‘Users’.

This will show you all the users that have permission to use your website. Currently, this should be you only. Go ahead and fill out your first and last names. You will also see a field for your nickname. You can see that my posts are from Nudge, this is my nickname.

You’ll see the option ‘Display name publicly as’ for which name you’ll want visitors to see. Change this drop-down menu to the preferred name you want people to know you by. That’s it, you’re all set with personality!

Your Logo Defines You

You could do this at a later stage, but I like to get a logo into my websites at the beginning so that I don’t have to muck around with display and appearance settings later on. Logo’s can vary in size and shape, but you want to check the logo settings in your theme first.

For instance, the settings in Divi really only allow for a smallish logo, unless you use some code like I have. This has allowed me to use a slightly larger logo and have it pushed to the top left corner and overhang the menu height.

I’m not good at code so it was found with a quick Google search.

Here is the exact same code I’ve used should you wish to implement a similar logo location.

I suppose you’re now wondering where this code gets placed!

This is one of the biggest bug-bears of mine.

Experts online that think they’re helping you out with a snippet of code but forget to tell you where to place it.

Thanks for the code guys but geez, where the hell do I put it!

So, this is where your piece of code will go. Divi>Theme Options> Custom CSS. This Custom CSS box is located at the bottom of the page.

If you’re not using Divi I suggest you just upload your logo under the theme settings and see how it appears.

You may have options to enlarge it or adjust left or right. Once it looks good, you’re ready to move on.

Homepage Setup

There are several ways to set up your home page. By default, when you click on your logo, a visitor will be returned to your homepage. You can choose to have all your new articles added to your homepage, or alternatively, have a static home page and select all your posts to be directed to a different page.

For instance, you could create a page called ‘Blog’ and have all your blog posts appear here. I want to eventually customize my homepage and this will be made easier for me if I use my Divi theme modules.

I’m going to choose to set a page called ‘Home’ and have my posts appear on this Home page.

I’ll set it up a little differently though, as my Divi theme has a ‘Blog’ module for this.

Firstly, create a new page called ‘Home’. Now click the ‘Use Divi Builder’ button.

This is a great way to set up a custom homepage that can incorporate many different elements. We’re just going to make it simple though. The first thing to do is add the number of columns you’ll like in this first row.

Choose 1 column. We’ll be modifying the blog layout in the ‘Blog’ module.

Then click on ‘Insert Module(s). This will then show you a full display of all the available modules that Divi can implement.

Choose ‘Blog’.

The Blog module that is highlighted in grey can now be customized. Can you see the 3 small horizontal lines on the left of the grey module? Click on this to open up the Blog module settings.

If you then click on the ‘Design’ tab, you have 2 options under ‘Layout’, Full Width or Grid. I like to choose Grid as the full width default shows your feature image way too large. This can be modified with CSS coding but we’re trying to make this simple, so choose Grid.

For now, click Publish. There’s one more setting you need to make to have this Homepage actually appear as your Homepage. Hover your mouse over ‘Settings’ on your WordPress dashboard and the sub-menu will appear.

Click on ‘Reading’. This sets up how your visitors will read your website.

The top item shows ‘Your homepage displays’. As we’ve created a special ‘Home’ page dedicated to how we’d like to customize it, we’ll set this page as a static homepage. So, click on ‘A static page’ and choose ‘Home’ from the drop-down menu.

This has now set the page that you created as your homepage. You can disregard the ‘Posts page’ drop-down menu. If you’d like your posts to appear on another specific page, you can choose to do so here. Save changes.

Many new bloggers like to experiment with a background image. Having experienced this, I still prefer the white background as it gives a much cleaner look.

Start a Menu Structure

Coming up with a menu structure for a website is not an easy task. Potentially you could choose hundreds of topics, subjects, categories and have to sort them into sub categories etc.

The great thing is, you can rearrange your menu structure as you go along and add more categories and subcategories. To start with, I’d advise a very small menu structure and grow it as you post more and more. You don’t want to have a load of drop-down menus that are 90% empty.

This is one way to get a large bounce rate (visitors leaving your website within seconds).

To begin with, we’ll get started with a footer menu because we’ve set up the types of pages that suit this purpose.

The menu structure is part of your website appearance, so go to your Dashboard>Appearance>Menus. You can have multiple menus on your website and to differentiate them, you’ll need to give each one a designated name.

Type a Menu name like ‘Footer’ in the new menu field and click ‘Create Menu’. Now you need to add menu items to your menu. This can be done in several ways. As you can see on the menu dialog box to the right, there are 4 segments where menu items can be selected from.

The first one (default) is Pages, which has a tab of the most recent pages you’ve created. If you’ve been working on a website for many months or years, you’ll use the other tabs of ‘View all’ and ‘Search’ to find menu items.

Today we’ll concentrate on ‘Most Recent’. To add a page to your menu structure, simply click the tick box next to the page, then click on ‘Add to Menu’. It’s that simple.

So, for this footer menu, we’ll tick the boxes for Affiliate Disclosure, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and Contact. Add them to menu and on the right pane you will see these menu items included. Save the menu.

As for now, your website doesn’t know where this footer menu is to be positioned. If you look underneath the menu items, you’ll see ‘Menu Settings’. Tick the ‘Footer Menu’.

Now your website knows exactly where this menu is to be located. View your website and scroll down to view the footer bar. You will now notice the footer menu items in this footer bar.

I’m thinking about changing the way this presents so if my footer menu is not displayed exactly as yours is, (if you’re following along), it’s because I’ve modified it as I’ve progressed the website.

The Primary Menu

I can also start to create a primary menu by adding a home page and site info. This is done in exactly the same manner as the footer menu, but with 2 changes.

Firstly, create a new menu called ‘Main Menu’ or ‘Primary’. Or something else that you’ll be comfortable remembering as your primary menu.

Now, I need to tick the Primary Menu option at the base of the menu items.  Yep, this will notify WordPress of where the menu is to be located.

Secondly, I want to make the same menu items as in the footer, as sub menu items in the primary menu. I also want a menu label called ‘Site Info‘, or something similar. Just don’t make the label too long.

To create a label that opens up the sub topics, but is not clickable itself, follow these instructions.

On the left pane, open up ‘Custom Links’. In the URL field, add a hashtag. Now fill in your label ‘Site Info’ in my case.

Click ‘Add to Menu’. Now go back to the left pane and click on Pages. Tick the pages you’d like as sub-menu items under ‘Site Info’, such as Contact or Privacy Policy.

Add them to menu.

Now, to have these items open when you hover over ‘Site Info’ in your menu, you need to place the menu items offset from the parent label. Just click on the menu item and drag it down slightly and to the right until it locks under the ‘Site Info’ label. (see image below)

There’s an animated image further down this page in relation to widgets. This drag and drop action is similar so it will give you more clarity about how to do this.

So, by now you should have a primary menu at the top of your homepage, and every page for that matter.

This is your main menu, but you can also add a secondary menu should you need it. If you’re just starting out however, I’d suggest you won’t require a secondary menu.

A Little Organization

Sometimes it can get a little confusing or unorganized with the amount of information you’d like to add to your website. Using this Divi theme allows me (and you if you’re using it) to name each module as it’s used.

For instance, my section above about Adding a menu is a Text module. By default, Divi will label this module ‘Text’, which makes sense right! Divi doesn’t know what I’m going to write about.

But I can change this in each module by scrolling down and changing the admin label. Here’s a brief video explaining this.

So there’s really no excuse for disorganization of your website is there!

Add Some Categories

Differentiating your articles needs to be done so your visitors can find what they’re searching for. This can be done by categorizing your posts. For instance, you may have some posts about books, others about movies, others about documentaries etc.

Setting up categories is simple and organizes everything. You can also setup sub-categories and yes, your posts can have multiple categories.

For now, I’ll set up a category called ‘Articles’. On my homepage I’m going to show all my articles so every post I write, will have the category ‘Articles’ attached to it.

I can also attach other categories to these posts later.

I’m also going to add a category called ‘WordPress’ and a sub-category called ‘Case Study’ which will be attached to this post.

I can then add a ‘WordPress’ menu item from the Categories tab, which will be all posts to do with WordPress websites.

To do this, hover your mouse over ‘Posts‘ in your dashboard and click on the sub-menu ‘Categories’. In here you can add a new category and give a parent category if required.

Alternatively, whilst you’re in a post you can add a category in the dialogs boxes on the right.

Again, you can add a parent category if required.

Now that you’ve added these categories, go back to your home page and modify the ‘Blog’ module. Edit the settings as shown below and tick the categories you want shown on your home page.

All my posts will include the ‘Articles’ category so I’ll just tick this box. I could also tick the other categories, but it wouldn’t make any difference in this case.

You may however, only want certain category’s published on your front page. This is where you’d only tick those categories.

Get Your House-Keeping in Order

Settings > General

We’ve made some alterations to the settings for your homepage but now it’s time to complete some other settings.

Adding a site title and tagline lets search engines know what your website is all about. There’s not much else you need to fill out on this page but you can go ahead and add your timezone and date and time formatting settings.

Settings > Writing

As I set my categories up previously, I can now go and set my default category. I’ll set ‘Articles’ as my default category so I don’t need to add this category to every post.

There’s no need to change any other settings here, as they’re mostly to do with posting via email. You won’t need to get into this sort of detail just yet, but I may post about this when I get further into this website.

Settings > Reading

We’ve covered this when setting up the Static homepage.

Although if you’re not using the Divi theme you can set how many posts you’d like appearing on your home page here. You’ll see the option ‘Blog pages show at most‘. The default is 10 but you may want 15 or 20.

For those of us using Divi, we can set this in the Blog module.

Settings > Discussion

There’s many settings here but they can be all left as default. All these options are self-explanatory and is all about how your visitors can add comments to your posts, how you get notified about these comments, if they should be moderated before appearing in your comments section etc.

Once you are 2-3 months into your website, you may start to see some comments and decide you’d like to modify the way they are handled.

Images Sizes & Site Speed

Settings > Media

By default, WordPress makes a copy of every image we upload to our websites, this is often not necessary.

The problem with this is that it can slow down your website loading time. This is a big issue because if your website takes a long time to load, your potential visitors will leave before you’ve captured their attention with your great content.

To add to this, the theme you’ve uploaded to use will also be creating image sizes to suit the theme. So, what can you do about this?

Under Settings>Media, you’ll find the 3 image sizes that WordPress automatically creates for you. To stop these sizes being created, enter 0 x 0 in all the image size boxes.

Itching to Make Money!

I know you’re itching to make money but let me tell you, it won’t happen unless you have a website setup correctly in the first place.

Do you really think it’s possible for money to come in the door without a plan! Without a pathway to success! Of course not, we’re getting the foundations right before we add any affiliate links to hook in our visitors.

Soon enough I’ll be showing you how to add income earning potential to each article you publish.

Experimenting with Plugins

You could almost see plugins as a necessary evil. They can often be so beneficial but on the other hand, as I’ve already mentioned, they can slow your website from loading in a time-frame that your visitors will expect.

Try to use plugins sparingly and only install them when necessary. Plugins can become addictive as they are there to improve the functionality of your website.

They are simple to install, and the library of plugins is huge. Here’s a brief video explaining how to install and activate a plugin.

See, very simple isn’t it. If you’re extremely new to this and have never installed a plugin, you’ll get used to it in no time. At some point you’ll want to install a plugin for Social sharing, so visitors can share your content on social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest or Facebook.

There are heaps of Social sharing plugins, some being so much better than others. I’ll show you which one I use in a different post.

Sidebar & Widgets

You will have seen at some point on a website, a sidebar. It’s generally a strip of various content down one side of a web page, usually the right side.

If you look at the right-hand side of this web page, I’ve got the same positioned sidebar. It’s a standard feature in many themes unless you specifically change settings to show no sidebar.

This piece of website real estate is an ideal way for many to utilise the sidebar for money making opportunities.

You can add banners, images or text with affiliate links to products with the aim of making a commission in mind.

So, let’s go through how you add items to the sidebar.

The first thing you need to do is hover over the ‘Appearance’ section in your WordPress dashboard and click on ‘Widgets’.

By default, your sidebar will have several components that WordPress pre-installs. You can see these in the attached image on the left.

The result of these elements on your actual website appear as shown on the right.

The widget section shows many different types of widgets that can be placed in order down the sidebar. The most popular of these is the ‘Text’ widget. You can add either a single line of text or headings but in 2017 the text widget was updated to allow for HTML elements.

You may not know what this is, but it’s a powerful addition.

TIP – HTML editor v Visual Editor

Let me explain the differences in the Visual Text and HTML Text. You’ll have both these options whenever you fill out any text content.

You’ll see these tabs at the top which you can switch between.

By default, you’ll start writing in the Visual text tab. This is also how you’ll see the text appear on your website in regard to font, color, size etc. You can change some of these modifications in the text editor settings.

(This text editor is all going to change soon with a major update to WordPress, coming in late 2018. So if this image of the text editor doesn’t look like yours, this is probably the reason).

If you switch to the Text (HTML) editor, you’ll notice the more modifications you’ve made to your text, the more coding has been added to the text lines.

For instance, say you write ‘I have blue text here and red here and this is bold’. We’ll also center the text. You then make modifications to how the text is to appear, so the text ‘blue’ is in color blue, the text ‘red’ is in color red and the text ‘bold’ is bolder than the rest.

Now we switch over to the Text (HTML) editor and you can see all the coding that has made these modifications. These brackets <> are known as tags. At the beginning you’ll see a <p style=”text-align: center;”> tag.

This centers the text. You can also notice the various colors and the HTML coding that dictates each color. (eg: color: #0000ff for blue and color: #ff0000 for red).

Type #0000ff or #ff0000 into Google and see what appears!

Most of the time you won’t be required to use the Text (HTML) editor, but it can come in handy if you need something specific, and the option is not available in the Visual editor. You may have to look up which HTML code you’ll need and the best place to find this is W3schools.

For instance, sometimes text or a different type of element just wont center properly. Simply switch to the Text (HTML) Editor and add <center> at the beginning and </center> at the end. Everything in between these tags will now be centered.

So, back to the widgets. Not only will you have a good selection of widget types, some added widgets will also appear within your theme.

The image right, shows many of the widget types I have available. The widgets that begin with ‘ET’ have come in with my Divi theme.

The ET stands for Elegant Themes, the company behind Divi theme.

To add any of these modules to your sidebar, simply drag and drop them into the ‘Sidebar’ pane, which will be located to the right of these widget modules.

You’ll come to understand what most of these modules do, currently they may look unfamiliar to you. But each one serves a purpose and can be advantageous in their own way.

If you just want to add an image to the sidebar, just hover your mouse over the image module, click down and drag it over to the sidebar pane.

Just like the short little animation file explains.

Now, Let’s Make Money!

The part you’ve all been anxiously waiting for!

And good for you if you’ve got this far by setting up a website. You’ve built the foundations of an income generating online business that you can work on anywhere in the world, providing WiFi is accessible!

So, how is it that websites with images, text links and so on, actually make money? How can you earn money from your website traffic, and how to earn money from website visits?

Well, we add what’s known as ‘affiliate links‘ in our link coding. It’s called affiliate marketing and allows anyone to make commissions on what they can promote, and then get a sale from, via their website.

Let me explain further.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Simply put, affiliate marketing is when you promote a product of a company and are able to generate a sale which has been directed through your website.

Read my Step-by-Step Guide to Affiliate Marketing post

Here’s an example:

1. You set up a website (oh yeah, you’ve done that!)
2. Apply to companies or merchants (such as Amazon) to join their affiliate program. Once approved, you’ll be given access to their affiliate section where you can get affiliate links for this company. You will have a special ID code in each affiliate link that identifies you.
3. Add these affiliate links to text or images of a product on your website post.
4. When a visitor clicks on this image or text, they are taken to the company’s website where they can purchase the product.
5. If this visitor decides to buy the product (or any other product on the website), you make a commission from all the sales made.

So, does that interest you?

The great thing about this online business model is that firstly, it’s a proven method which has worked so well in the past. And secondly, it’s only going to get bigger and bigger as more people purchase online.

Oh, and thirdly, anyone can do it!

So, where to from here.

Well, there’s two options. You can continue to build your own website and apply for affiliate programs. This will certainly get you on the right track and you’ll learn as you go. The only problem is that it could be a longer process than it needs to be.

Alternatively, you could learn from the masters of affiliate marketing by creating an account at Wealthy Affiliate.

This way you’ll not only have access to the best website builder around, you’ll also learn how to rank in Google, get loads of website traffic, learn how to build an email list and get the most comprehensive up-to-date affiliate marketing training possible. You can create an account below.

I’m tipping that you’re fairly new to all this if you’ve read up to this point. Which probably means you’ll need a little help along the way.

It’s an exciting journey but does come with learning a new skill that requires knowledge. My advice would be to create a FREE account and decide for yourself if you think Wealthy Affiliate is for you. You’ll have access to all the premium features for 7 days and you won’t even need a credit card to sign up.

You’ll even get to keep the FREE website and FREE membership should you decide against the premium version. Win/Win!

I hope you enjoyed this tuition of how to build a website to make money.